The Heirloom Read online

  And Johnny shall have a new ribbon,

  To tie up his bonny blond hair.’

  My voice was husky, wavering, off-key. It’s hard to sing and swallow back your tears at the same time. When I looked across at Sara she was openly weeping.

  I turned back to Jonathan. He hadn’t stirred. I sang the nursery-rhyme again, but there was no sign that my singing had penetrated his private dream, or touched his sleeping memory.

  ‘What do the doctors say?’ I asked Sara.

  ‘They still don’t know,’ she said, tiredly. ‘He’s in good physical shape, and they can’t find anything wrong with his brain. No contusions, no infection. One of the specialists said it’s almost like he’s hypnotised. As if he can’t wake up until someone gives him the right command.’

  I bit at my knuckle. ‘If this coma is anything to do with that damned chair…’

  ‘The chair’s gone now, hasn’t it?’

  I said, ‘Yes, as far as I know. It wasn’t in the house. But if it could take seven hours out of my life… maybe its influence is still around.’

  ‘Did you talk to Father Corso?’

  ‘I didn’t have time. As soon as I found out that it was nearly five o’clock, I rushed straight back here.’

  ‘You will talk to him, though?’

  I stared at Jonathan, lost in his coma. ‘Yes, I’ll talk to him. I’ll try anything. I’ll even try an exorcism if you think it’ll do any good.’

  ‘I don’t know what the doctors would think.’

  I walked around the bed. ‘I don’t give a damn what the doctors would think. The doctors didn’t see Sheraton. The doctors didn’t see the leaves falling off the trees.’

  Sara touched Jonathan’s arm, and stroked the back of his curled-up fingers. Outside in the hospital corridor, the paging bell rang, and a garbled voice asked for one cardiac resuscitation pack, urgent please, to 911. Somebody else was fighting for their life.

  Dr Gopher came in. ‘Would you mind leaving Jonathan for a short while?’ he asked us. ‘We have some more tests to run.’

  ‘What do you think about his chances now?’ I asked him. ‘Are the odds any better than they were this morning? Or are they worse?’

  Dr Gopher shrugged. ‘I’m not a bookmaker, Mr Delatolla. I’m a specialist in pediatric brain problems.’

  ‘What tests?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘I need to make sure that there’s no pressure on the brain that our first tests may have overlooked. I also need to analyse the spinal fluid. I can’t overlook any possible causes. You may like to know that I’ve asked Detroit’s Neural Research Centre for all the information they have on infantile coma, and that the Susskind Foundation have already sent us all of their latest findings on concussion. We’re doing everything we can.’

  I looked at Jonathan lying on his high hospital bed, surrounded by drip-stands and tubes. ‘I hope it’s enough,’ I said, in a tone that wasn’t meant to sound harsh, but just came out that way.

  Dr Gopher lowered his clipboard. ‘I hope so, too, Mr Delatolla. Believe me.’

  While Sara showered and changed, I sat in the waiting-room and flicked through National Geographic magazines, and old copies of Los Angeles. I liked the small ads in Los Angeles, particularly the classification ‘None Of The Above’. Somebody was offering party entertainment by ‘The Unknown Gypsies Kumpania… unique, outrageous, and dramatically different’ and another company could provide singing telegrams by ‘Frank The Giant Singing Hot Dog’.

  I was practically asleep when the waiting-room door opened and David Sears came lurching in. He was looking sweaty and dishevelled, and he’d taken off his striped necktie and crammed it into his breast pocket. He sat down heavily on the chair next to me, and searched around in his coat for cigarettes.

  ‘My God,’ he said, lighting up, and taking down a deep draught of smoke. ‘I thought I was never going to make it.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked him. ‘Did you get rid of the chair?’

  He shook his head. ‘The chair almost got rid of me. It’s far more powerful than I ever realised.’

  ‘Where is it now?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue. I’ve been looking for it everywhere. I’ve even been around to your house, trying to see through the windows. I got moved on by a security guard. He damn near arrested me.’

  I watched him closely. The cigarette began to calm him down, and soon he was steady enough to sit up straight, mop the sweat from his face with a handkerchief, and tug his cuffs.

  ‘Well?’ I asked him. ‘How did you lose it?’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure. I was going to take it to Los Angeles airport, have it crated up, and fly it back to England on tomorrow afternoon’s plane. But I was only a mile or so past San Juan Capistrano when I started to get the most ridiculous sensations. I kept feeling that I was bleeding all down my back – as if I was sitting in a welter of my own blood. I actually pulled off the road to make sure that I was all right. Then, when I started driving again, I became convinced that I was afflicted with leprosy, that my ankles were coming away in chunks inside of my socks, and that the flesh was actually falling off my bones. I stopped again, and this time, when I looked in the back of the car, the chair had gone.’

  I tossed down my magazine. ‘It looks like we haven’t carried out the proper sales ritual, then, doesn’t it?’ I asked him. ‘What did you call it, a runic transaction?’

  He sucked at his cigarette so violently that it burned down almost a half-inch in one hot inhalation. Then, with smoke spurting out of his nostrils, he said, ‘That’s right. A conveyance of sale in the ancient manner of the runes.’

  ‘How’s it done? Do you happen to know?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. But somebody must know.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Old man Jessop. Otherwise, how did he get rid of the chair?’

  I blinked at him. ‘You really think we can go up to old man Jessop and ask him how to carry out a runic sales transaction?’

  ‘Why not? He owned the chair for fifteen years, and all it ever brought him was money. He must know how to handle it.’

  ‘Well, I guess you’re right,’ I said, thoughtfully. ‘The Jessops sure did seem to get nothing but luck.’

  ‘It probably depends on your inclinations,’ David remarked. ‘If you’re an unscrupulous old tightwad like Jessop, then you and the chair are very probably going to get along. But if you’re at all moral… if you actually believe in God, and stay faithful to your wife, and try not to tread on ants when you walk along your garden path… then I think you’ve got yourself more trouble than you can handle.’

  I thought of what the floating figure had whispered to me in the laundry-room. ‘You will never get rid of me. Not until you accept what I have to give you.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about exorcism,’ I told David, rather bashfully.

  ‘Exorcism? You can’t do that. Besides, it’s nothing more than ecclesiastical mumbo-jumbo. Waving candles about and spraying Holy water and reciting some of the sillier pieces in the Bible.’

  ‘David,’ I insisted, ‘we have to do something. That chair has hurt my son, and now he’s lying in a coma, and the doctors don’t even know when he’s going to wake up. That’s if he ever does wake up. Exorcism isn’t going to be any less effective than taking lumbar punctures and singing songs.’

  ‘Well, I suppose not,’ said David, ‘but I did hear that someone had tried to exorcise the chair before.’

  ‘Oh yes, who?’

  ‘I don’t exactly know who. One of the chair’s previous owners. As soon as it began to play unpleasant tricks on him, he called on a priest and they went through the whole procedure… you know, “yield to me by the Sacred Virgin Mary who gave Her womb” and all that stuff.’

  ‘What happened?’

  David lit a fresh cigarette from the glowing butt of the first. ‘I don’t think they realised that the chair is not in itself an evil spirit. The chair in itself is nothing more t
han a passageway through which evil spirits can pass from the nether-world into the real world. A nexus, as I said before.’

  He paused, and then he said, ‘The owner of the chair, and the priest who had agreed to perform the exorcism – both were found the following day by neighbours. The neck of one had been twisted around the neck of the other, so that they formed a sort of two-headed monster. They were both dead, of course, of shock and strangulation.’

  I sat back. ‘Listen, David,’ I said firmly, ‘are you coming clean with me about this chair? Every time you talk about it you seem to be able to remember just a little bit more pertinent information. Are you hiding something?’

  ‘Why should I hide anything?’

  ‘Now you’re answering a question with a question.’

  David looked at me, thoughtfully and unswervingly, for almost a whole minute. Then he leaned forward and tapped the ash off his cigarette into the stand-up ashtray.

  ‘I do know quite a bit about the chair, I must admit. There are certain gaps in my knowledge… certain vital gaps… but I suppose you could say that I know more about it than anybody who hasn’t actually owned it.’

  I cleared my throat. ‘What I want to know is if there’s anything at all in the history of that chair that could help me to save Jonathan. The rest of it can go hang.’

  David shook his head. ‘I wish there were. But the chair seems to behave differently towards different people, according to what they want from it. And according to how much they want to keep it.’

  ‘I don’t want to keep it at all.’

  ‘I know you don’t,’ said David. ‘That’s probably why it’s treating you so badly. And although I can’t be sure, that’s probably why Jonathan’s gone into a coma. He’s a hostage, or at least his mind is. Because as long as he’s unconscious, you’re always going to be interested in the chair. The chair wants your attention.’

  ‘But why? How can a chair want attention? And what for?’

  ‘I just don’t know. I have a kind of weak theory, based on what I know of the chair’s history, but it’s been impossible to verify.’

  ‘Well, weak or not, let’s hear it.’

  ‘If you really want to,’ said David. ‘You see… whenever somebody comes into possession of the chair… they always seem to do extraordinarily well at whatever business they might be in. With the Earl of Beckenham, of course, it was gambling. With the Jessops, it was aviation. As I’ve said before, I don’t know who all of the owners of the chair have been, but my banker friend Williams made an absolute fortune. And about two years ago I came across a rather circumstantial account by a nineteenth-century magazine writer who visited the home of Charles Dickens, and described a curious carved chair with the face of a male Gorgon.’

  ‘So the chair helps people to make a success of their lives.’

  ‘That’s right. If you allowed it to, it would probably help you make a resounding success out of yours.’

  I massaged the back of my neck. My muscles were as tight as spinet wires. ‘If it wants to help me,’ I asked David, ‘why is it acting so goddamned malevolent? Why did it kill Sheraton? Why did it blight all the trees around my home? Why has it taken Jonathan?’

  ‘I don’t know the answers to all of your questions,’ said David. ‘But my guess is that the chair is trying to make you surrender. It’s trying to show you how powerful it is, and that it’s no use trying to fight against it. Wouldn’t you think so?’

  ‘Well, maybe you’re right,’ I admitted, reluctantly. ‘But it all sounds pretty screwy to me.’

  ‘What the hell do you expect?’ demanded David. ‘You expect logic? You expect sanity? You’re asking me to rationalise a piece of furniture that was made to the order of a corrupt eighteenth-century rake by an unbalanced eighteenth-century freak – and made for the express purpose of bringing its owner the luck of the devil. The real Devil, if there is such a person. For Christ’s sake, Ricky, you’ve seen for yourself what that chair can do. It’s like a magnet in the middle of a field of iron filings. It can swirl everything around it just the way it wants. Trees, dogs, pictures, hours of the day, even human destiny.’

  ‘But why?’ I retorted. ‘I don’t want it to help me in my work, or at home, or anywhere. I don’t want anything from it at all, except that it should go off and leave me and my family alone. Why does it keep coming back to me? What does it want?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said David. ‘It seems to want something, but I simply can’t imagine what it is.’

  I got up, exasperated, and paced to the window. It was dark outside now, and the night was glittering with lights. An aeroplane sank into San Diego airport like a cluster of slowly falling UFOs. I turned back to David, and said, ‘Somehow, I have to get rid of that chair, for good and all. I just have to get rid of it.’

  ‘You know that I’d take it away from you if I could.’

  ‘You can’t, though, can you? The minute you try to drive it away you start bleeding or falling to pieces.’

  ‘Hallucinations,’ said David.

  ‘Sure they’re hallucinations. But can you tolerate them? Obviously not, or you wouldn’t have come scurrying back here.’

  ‘Ricky,’ insisted David. ‘I want that chair. And if we can find any way of transferring ownership from you to me, then I’ll do it like a shot.’

  I stood over him, my hands on my hips. ‘You want the chair but the chair doesn’t want you. That’s the whole trouble.’

  ‘My client wants the chair, to be slightly more accurate.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter who wants it,’ I said. ‘If it doesn’t want to go, then it won’t.’

  ‘Supposing we go talk to old man Jessop?’ David suggested.

  ‘What difference is that going to make?’

  ‘Well, Jessop managed to off-load the chair on to your late friend Henry Grant. So, how did Jessop do it? Why didn’t the chair go back to Escondido? Maybe Jessop knows all about runic transactions. He’s owned that chair for nearly fifteen years; he must know more about it than we do. Even a clue would help.’

  He crushed out his cigarette as he watched me for my reaction.

  ‘You could be right,’ I said, grudgingly. ‘I guess it wouldn’t do us any harm if we went out to Escondido and asked him.’

  ‘Would Sara mind if you left the hospital?’

  ‘Not if she thought I was doing something constructive to help Jonathan. Which I hope I will be.’

  ‘What else is there to do? Sit here and wait? You can’t help Jonathan if you’re sitting here.’

  Sara came back from the bathroom, smelling fresh and clean, with her hair tied up in a towel.

  ‘David,’ she said. Her face fell.

  I put my arm around her. ‘David just got here. He tried to take the chair away, but… well, it wasn’t any use. He got as far as San Juan Capistrano and it vanished out of his car.’

  ‘Where is it now?’ asked Sara, her face as waxy and expressionless as one of those store-window fashion models.

  ‘I just don’t know,’ David admitted. ‘But if you were to ask me to make an educated guess… I’d say it was back at your house.’

  Sara sat down. ‘Oh, God,’ was all she could say.

  ‘David thought that it might be worth going out to Escondido to talk to old man Jessop about it,’ I explained.

  ‘Do you think it’ll do any good?’ asked Sara.

  ‘It can’t do any harm,’ said David.

  Sara held her hand over her mouth as if to prevent herself from saying anything more. I could see the hurt in her eyes, and the fear too, but there wasn’t anything I could do to help her. Not unless I managed to purge our house and our family life of that hideous chair, for ever.

  ‘I’ll try to be quick as I can,’ I told Sara. ‘Barring accidents, or time warps, I should be back here before ten.’

  She nodded, without taking her hand away from her mouth.

  I bent over and kissed her forehead. ‘I love you,’ I said, simply, and she clo
sed her eyes in acknowledgement of that simple fact, and to show that my feelings were returned.

  The nurses allowed me to take one quick look at Jonathan before I left. David waited in the corridor, his hands clasped behind his back like the Duke of Edinburgh, clearing his throat from time to time as if he were about to make a speech. He was the first Englishman I’d ever gotten anything like close to, and I must say it was a curious and educational experience. It was like playing a game in which your opponent knew the rules, but you didn’t, and so you had to pick it up as you went along just by watching him. Quite often I couldn’t work out if he’d made a genuine move to improve our relationship, or if he was only being polite.

  Jonathan hadn’t stirred. His one visible eye was still closed, his small fingers still clasped the blankets. I stood over him for a few minutes, and then looked up at the nurses.

  ‘Any change? Any signs at all?’

  One of the nurses sympathetically shook her head.

  I gently touched Jonathan’s forehead with my fingertips, and sang:

  ‘Johnny shall have a new bonnet,

  Johnny shall go to the fair,

  And Johnny shall have a new ribbon,

  To tie up his bonny blond hair.’

  There was no response. I stayed where I was for a moment, bent over him, and then I stood straight.

  A voice inside of my head, echoing and metallic, said, ‘You shall never have him back. Not as long as you resist me.’

  I stared at Jonathan. ‘I won’t resist you,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, that’s easy for you to say now. But I have heard you swear to be rid of me. Once I release the child, you will try to destroy me.’

  ‘I won’t. That’s my solemn promise. I’ll stake my life on it.’

  ‘Your life is worth nothing.’

  ‘Then what do you want? You keep attacking me, you keep turning my whole world upside-down, but you won’t tell me what you want!’

  ‘Mr Delatolla –’ said one of the nurses. ‘Mr Delatolla, please –’

  ‘You’ve taken my son, you’ve scared my wife half to death, you’ve killed my dog. Tell me what you want!’

  ‘Can’t you guess? You’ve had long enough now. Can’t you guess?’